Strike the Haqqani Terror Network’s Wallet

Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- In confirmation hearings last week,
Richard Olson, President Barack Obama’s nominee for ambassador
to Pakistan, said his top priority would be working with the
Pakistanis to degrade the Taliban-allied Haqqani network.

With good reason, the U.S. considers the Haqqani network to
be the greatest threat to international and local forces in
Afghanistan. Its trademark is suicide attacks, like those last
September in Kabul on the U.S. Embassy and the headquarters of
NATO-led international troops. Much of the Haqqanis’ success
owes to the haven that the group enjoys in North Waziristan,
part of Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal region.

Unfortunately, the odds of getting the Pakistanis to crack
down are slim. Like the Americans, they have a history with the
group; both supported its founder, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his
followers in the 1980s against the Soviets, who then occupied
Afghanistan. Unlike the Americans, though, the Pakistanis have
kept up their ties and regard the group as key to their future -
- insurance that the government of Afghanistan’s president,
Hamid Karzai, won’t get powerful enough to gang up with India
against Pakistan, which sits between the two. That scenario
might sound far-fetched, but it’s real to Pakistanis.

Anyway, Pakistan is not in a particularly appeasing mood.
It only recently reopened its roads to allow the resupply of
international forces in Afghanistan after the U.S. belatedly
apologized for accidentally killing 24 Pakistani soldiers near
the border last November.

Although the U.S. can’t count on Pakistan as a partner, it
can do more to combat the Haqqanis on its own. Last month, the
House and Senate passed a resolution urging the State Department
to add the network to the U.S. list of foreign terrorist
organizations. The president should overcome his hesitation and
sign the measure so that it takes force.

The administration has been reluctant to go that route
because it fears foreclosing the chance that the Haqqanis will
join the suspended Afghan national-reconciliation effort. The
U.S. hopes that process will produce a political settlement
before its last troops are scheduled to leave Afghanistan in
2014.

Without a terrorist designation, however, the U.S. has
little power to disrupt the Haqqani network’s well-established
fundraising in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries.
The U.S. has sanctioned a handful of Haqqani leaders, freezing
any assets they hold under U.S. jurisdiction and prohibiting
Americans from doing business with them. Labeling the group as
terrorist would bar Americans from supplying the group with
money and, more important, require financial institutions to
block all funds in which it has an interest. The U.S. Treasury
has enforced the latter ban in previous cases by threatening to
shun any bank that handles such transactions, an action that has
cut into the earnings of other terrorist organizations, notably
al-Qaeda.

The Haqqanis wouldn’t like this, but that wouldn’t
necessarily decrease the odds of their joining a reconciliation
process. Like the Taliban, they will agree to a political
settlement when they are sufficiently weakened or they calculate
it is in their interests. Cutting into their funds could hasten
that determination.

In any case, the prospect of reconciliation hasn’t
inhibited the Haqqanis from killing Americans, who are likewise
killing Haqqanis. In that deadly context, throttling their
funding seems both sensible and appropriate.

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